Creators Of MYST Release Teaser For New Game

Development studio Cyan, now home for the original creators of Myst, have released a new teaser trailer for their upcoming project Obduction. The game is set to work as a spiritual successor to the game Myst, focusing on beautiful environments and mind-bending puzzles throughout.

Over on the official Cyan YouTube channel they posted up the teaser video showing off a number of different environments, locations, and objects while also teasing what the main plot of the game might be about. You can check out the near two minute teaser below.

Obduction is set to carry on the mystery-exploration genre that the Myst creators popularized back in the 1990s. The genre faded away after the popularity of titles like Riven faded from view. During that time PC gaming was going through a rather lethargic moment when it came to sales, thanks to things like the burgeoning console scene, piracy, and studios no longer being able to afford to stay in operation.

For a while games like Myst just kind of faded from view and the mystery-exploration sub-genre took a back seat for many years. It wasn't until Kickstarter did a lot of dead-and-buried gaming categories, that it made a comeback thanks to nostalgia and developers finding new purpose. From Chris Roberts reviving space sims with Star Citizen to inXile reviving cRPGs with Wasteland 2, a lot of old-school genres popped up with a new-school take. Also, with the removal of the traditional publishing model from the table, it allowed developers and gamers to connect direct and for fans to fund the kind of games they wanted to play. Obduction was one of those games.

Back in late 2013 Cyan Inc., took to Kickstarter fund their spiritual successor to Myst called Obduction. The game has been in development ever since, running on Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and allowing the developers to visually bring a high-quality gaming experience to life without requiring a photogrammetry studio or having to exploit processor-heavy techniques like path tracing to bring the eye-popping visuals to life.

Even more recently, Cyan also revealed that the composer of Obduction is the brother of one of the co-creators that worked on the original Myst and Riven. Simply referred to as Robyn, it was noted in a Kickstarter update back in November of 2015 that he would score the music for Obduction. Robyn currently runs the music production company Zoo Break Productions, who is responsible for various projects, including two feature films. So the music is definitely in good hands.

According to the trailer, the game is scheduled to launch this summer, specifially sometime in June. Originally the game was targeting the Windows PC and Mac for a late 2015 release, but we all know how things may not always go as planned in game development and the release was pushed to the summer of 2016. Of course, the delay isn't all that bad and at least it's only about half a year out from when it was originally scheduled to release.